Edited by Daniel Owen and Lisa Pearson

$30.00

Sign up for our mailing list (on the right) and get a code for 25% off!

Or become a Siglio Advocate and get this book along with our three other 2018 titles with free shipping for $100. Advocates also get special discounts on trade and limited editions! It’s a great deal that also supports Siglio’s fiercely independent mission.

In our current environment, it is difficult to look at [Dermisache’s] work and not think about the impossibility of discourse, the primacy of self-expression, and the fallacy of a shared objective language, not to think of this art as both radically political and necessary today.

I “write” (inscribe) my books, which are perfectly illegible, and that tenuous structure of “gaps” is filled as soon as it reaches the “reader.” —Mirtha Dermisache

Argentinian artist Mirtha Dermisache wrote dozens of books, hundreds of letters and postcards, and countless texts. Not a single one was legible, yet, in their promixity to language, they all resonate with a mysterious potential for meaning. Using ink on paper, Dermisache invented an array of graphic languages, each with its own unique lexical and syntactic structure, laden with poetic and sometimes visceral suggestion. Some writings feel like nets or knots or or transcriptions of seismic waves; some are scrawled with seeming abandon while others are meticulously inked in a refined, almost musical script.

Selected Writings is Dermisache’s first collection to be published in the U.S. and includes sixteen texts and two complete books from the early 1970s, a particularly rich period for the artist. Dermisache intended her writings to be published, disseminated and read, rather than exhibited as singular works of art. Prioritizing the intimate relationship between reader and text, she published her work in variety of editions during her lifetime, including tabloid-sized newspapers and as (textual) contributions to journals. In keeping with Dermisache’s intentions, Selected Writings is a beautiful object, designed to have a distinct kinship to a book of poetry and to allow the work to speak for itself.

Praised by Roland Barthes in the early ‘70s for the “extreme intelligence of the theoretical problems related to writing that [her] work entails,” Dermisache’s graphisms suggest both an abstract “essence of writing” and a concrete democratization of written forms—an elaborate exploration of the possibilities for ink and page to make a represent thought. Every piece of writing is open to each reader’s unique sense of signification.

The subtlety and rigor of her work—her writing without words, typography without text, drawings without images—make Mirtha Dermisache an essential artist—not just of Argentinian art, but also of what we have come to call international visual poetry.

—Philippe Cyroulink in the exhibition catalog Because I Write!

MIRTHA DERMISACHE (b. Buenos Aires, 1940–2012) was a visual artist whose rigorous inquiries into the “essence of writing” resulted in a prolific body of work at once deeply experimental, magentically beautiful and insistently democratic. Her work was introduced to North American audiences by the beloved exhibition “Drawing Time, Reading Time” at The Drawing Center (New York) in 2014. Other group shows include “elles@centrepompidou” at Centre Pompidou in Paris, “In the Margins of Art: Creation and Political Commitment” at MACBA in Barcelona, among many others. Her first major retrospective “Because I Write!” was recently mounted at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires in 2017. “Mirtha Dermisache: The Otherness of Writings” is open now at Henrique Faria Fine Arts in New York City and runs until January 20, 2018.

This form needs Javascript to display, which your browser doesn't support. Sign up here instead

SUPPORT OUR FIERCELY INDEPENDENT ENDEAVOR

Like what we do? You can help us continue to publish uncommon books simply by buying them directly from us. If you sign up for the newsletter (above), we'll send you a discount code for 25% off.You also get a little gift of Siglio ephemera as a thank you with your order! Supporting Siglio is easy: when you buy a book directly from us, you are investing in the vibrancy and longevity of the press.

Get 35% off to plump up your collection of Siglio books. Fill your cart with twelve different titles (or at least $375 worth of books*) to use code LIBRARY. Please note: the order ships when all books are in stock.